Wines & Vines

Collector's Edition WINES&VINES 35 COLLECTOR'S EDITION According to Wines Vines Analytics and Ship- Compliant by Sovos, DtC shipments totaled nearly $3 billion in the 12 months ending in October 2018 (not counting wines bought and carried out of winery tasting rooms), reflecting a 16% in- crease over the same period last year. And it's the small wineries (5,000 to 49,999 cases) and very small wineries (1,000 to 4,999 cases) that con- ducted the bulk of those shipments, accounting for 70% of the value of winery shipping. Andy Beckstoffer Helped win growers compensation commensurate with grape quality Andy Beckstoffer is a major landowner and grapegrower in California's Napa, Mendocino and Lake counties who not only produces grapes that earn some of the highest scores possible from critics, but also has advocated for growers to be protected by appellation legislation and paid in fair proportion to the price of the wines that wineries make from their grapes. Beckstoffer came to Napa Valley in 1970 as an employee of wine and spirits company Heublein to form a company to de- velop and manage vineyards. He soon pur- chased the company and assumed ownership of several vineyard properties that remain a part of Beckstoffer Vineyards' 3,600 acres. Beckstoffer was a founding director and the second president of the Napa Valley Grape Growers Association, and in that role he pro- moted a grape-pricing policy that became a widely accepted benchmark for high-quality wines in California: A ton of grapes should be worth 100 times the retail price of a bottle of wine made from them. He also led the Napa Valley Grape Growers Association in creating the Winery Definition Ordinance that required grapes used in wines labeled with the Napa Valley AVA to be at least 75% grown in the AVA. Nat DiBuduo Grapegrower spokesman helped empower vineyard owners Nat DiBuduo served as president of the 500-member Allied Grape Growers association from 2000 until 2018. He became an important spokesman for its vineyard-owning members around California as they sought better prices for their grapes and more power in the some- times testy relationships between themselves as grape sellers and the state's larger wineries as the grape buyers. A native of the San Joa- quin Valley of California, DiBuduo earned a bachelor's degree in plant science and viticul- ture from California State University, Fresno in 1973. He managed vineyards in almost every major grapegrowing region in California before joining the AGG. "My previous roles in farm management, independent consulting and vineyard develop- ment positioned me to understand the chal- lenges facing California grapegrowers and equipped me with the desire and ability to make a difference," he stated when announcing his retirement. In recent years, DiBuduo had bemoaned falling prices for grapes from the interior valleys of the state and urged Califor- nia wineries to be more competitive against low-priced, imported wines despite the wider premiumization trend in the U.S. market. Digital Resources for Vineyards Major tools helped professionalize vineyard operations Breakthroughs in digital tools for use in vine- yards changed the game for vineyard owners and managers by helping them assess the state of their vines and strategically apply the results of new research into viticulture methods, ir- rigation and disease treatment. These included remote sensing for disease detection; Normal- ized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for mapping vineyard variations for management and harvest decisions; Global Positioning Sys- tem (GPS) for mapping and reference grid for infield attributes, and a basis for related data accumulation. They proved to be major tools for professionalization of vineyard operations and information. Drip Irrigation Conserving water and expanding vineyards Irrigation water delivered through lightweight plastic hoses in precise quantities was an Israeli innovation, but it never found a better industry to serve than wine-grape growing in the West- ern states and British Columbia. Before drip or micro irrigation became available in the 1970s, grapegrowers in areas with a Mediterranean climate, meaning where little or no rain fell during the growing season, whose vines couldn't draw enough water from the ground to stay healthy and productive had to use either flood irrigation, which required an enormous volume of water and the costly rights to buy that water, or overhead sprinklers, which wasted water through evaporation, wet the vine canopy and encouraged mildew and other vine diseases. Drip irrigation was easy to install above ground, could be targeted directly where the vine roots could take up the water, delivered fertilizer blended into the water and made hillside vineyards much more viable. Dr. Roger Boulton Imagined and built the winery of the future After earning a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Melbourne, Australia, Roger Boulton came to the University of Cali- fornia, Davis and has been a leading researcher, teacher and author in his roles with both the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Department of Viticulture and Enology. In 2000 he was named among the "50 Most influential people in the U.S. Wine Industry" by Wines & Vines. In 1998, he and three colleagues (Vernon Singleton, Linda Bisson and Ralph Kunkee) received the Office International de la Vigne et du Vin Prize in Oenology for their book "The Principles and Practices of Winemaking." This text won a spot on the shelves of hundreds of winemakers in North America and was trans- lated into Spanish and Chinese while still in its first edition. Boulton has lectured widely about "the win- ery of the future" and got the rare opportunity to create such a facility when he led the design

• Cover